@bighammer:
There’s a side of me that wonders if I made more of these, if they would sell. (and for how much?) The first is always the slowest, but after all the measuring and figuring is done, it gets pretty simple to do….
There would probably be a market for these – no doubt just a small and specialized one, but this wouldn’t be a problem because I assume you’d build the tables only on request rather than producing an inventory, so you’d never have any unsold stock lying around. The technical issue you’d have to figure out, however, would relate to shipping and assembly. Shipping costs might well be significant for something as heavy as the table…but the real problem would actually be volume. The fully assembled table could only be shipped by truck, which is probably okay for local customers in your town but becomes more difficult between cities. My guess is that shipping costs depend both on weight and volume, so to keep shipping costs down you’d presumably have to work out a design that could be shipped flat-packed (kind of like Ikea furniture). This in turn would mean that the design would have to allow for easy assembly by the customer upon receipt (again, like Ikea furniture), using very simple tools (a hammer and a screwdriver) that the average person is likely to have around the house and using simple instructions that the average person could follow. There are probably home-handicraft hobbyists who have the specialized tools, the skill and the enthusiam to handle more complex assembly requirements (I certainly don’t fall into that category), but it would limit your potential market if your design was aimed at such hobbyists rather than at more general customers.